England

England is first encountered by C. S. Lewis not as a familiar neighboring country but as an alien landscape that seems to imprison him. His childhood journey from the Irish coast turns flatness, unfamiliar architecture, and strange accents into sources of distress; only later does the landscape around Wyvern begin to heal the hostility, giving England a more complicated place in his memory.

First impressions and estrangement

After leaving the quay, Lewis watches the lights recede across Belfast Lough, with the cluster astern representing everything he has known. The sea crossing gives way to an early-morning arrival in England, which he remembers as a world to which he reacted with immediate hatred. Lancashire’s flats seem like the banks of Styx, while the unfamiliar English accents sound demonic. The railway journey from Fleetwood to Euston intensifies the dislocation: land stretches on without relief, shutting him away from the sea and the high ridges that had shaped his sense of home.

The country also appears wrong in its details. Wooden fences replace stone walls and hedges; red-brick farmhouses take the place of white cottages; the fields seem too large and the haystacks wrongly shaped. Lewis compares the stranger’s house to a floor full of knots, borrowing an image from the Kalevala to express how every feature feels unfamiliar. He later says that he made up the quarrel, but the hatred he conceived at this moment took many years to heal.

Hertfordshire and the unfamiliar climate

The family’s destination is the small town Lewis calls Belsen, in Hertfordshire. The phrase Green Hertfordshire, associated with Lamb, does not match the country as the boy sees it: this is flat, flinty Hertfordshire, with yellow soil, unlike County Down. The contrast is not only visual. Lewis recalls a marked difference between the climates of Ireland and England, and says that at Belsen he first experienced bitter frost, stinging fog, sweltering heat, and thunderstorms on a grand scale.

The landscape also enlarges his childhood sense of the uncanny. Through the dormitory’s curtainless windows he first encounters the full moon’s ghastly beauty. England is therefore not merely the hostile setting of a move; its weather and night sky supply experiences that are at once concrete and strange, extending his imaginative world even while he resists the country itself.

Reconciliation at Wyvern

Lewis’s quarrel with England is eventually healed by the landscape around Wyvern. Below the school lies a great blue plain; behind it rise green, peaked hills, mountainous in form yet manageable in size. Their particular combination of grandeur and human scale becomes an immediate delight. Wyvern Priory, too, is the first building he recognizes as beautiful.

This change does not erase the earlier estrangement so much as give it a counterweight. England first meant enclosure, sameness, and distance from the sea; at Wyvern, its plain and hills become a source of pleasure, and its architecture offers a new standard of beauty. The remembered country thus holds both the childhood hostility that took years to soften and the landscape that finally made reconciliation possible.